Pod Insights All In The Mind The psychology of masturbation About this episode This week we're talking about something intimate… and sometimes taboo: masturbation.
From self-love, to disordered behaviour and back again, we explore how our perceptions of masturbation have changed over the course of history and why it's still linked to shame and confusion for some.
Also, why do humans (and other animals) masturbate in the first place?
Just a heads up, if the topic didn't give it away, this episode may not be suitable for little ones.
You can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode first aired in September 2024.
Guests:
Esme Louise JamesPhD candidate, University of MelbourneContent creator and author of Kinky History
Dr Vijayasarathi RamanathanClinical sexologistSenior Lecturer of Sexual Health (Sexology) at Westmead Clinical School, University of Sydney
Dr Ann JonesHost, What the Duck?!
Dr Matilda BrindleEvolutionary biologistUniversity of Oxford
Credits:
Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Beth StewartMore information:
Sex is Weird | What the Duck?! https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/what-the-duck/sex-is-weird/104213450To find the transcript for this episode, head to its original webpage https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/allinthemind/psychology-of-masturbation/104295800.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:08 Speaker 01 This episode is one from our archives. Just a heads up, today's episode deals with a lot of sexual content. Specifically, we're talking about masturbation. So if you have little ones listening in, proceed with caution.
0:26 Speaker 01 You know, cornflakes, the breakfast cereal? Plain, crunchy. You wouldn't call it delicious, exactly, or something you're likely to crave, but you know, they're perfectly nice and unremarkable.
0:41 Speaker 01 All of these qualities, they are very much the point of cornflakes. They're by design. And you'll understand why, once you learn about the bizarre beliefs of one of its co-creators.
0:54 Speaker 02 It is such an incredible story, and one that is such a good icebreaker at a party. Now, Kellogg was a Seventh Day Adventist.
1:03 Speaker 01 Kellogg being Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. He and his brother founded the Kellogg's Breakfast Company.
1:09 Speaker 02 He had this idea of bodily pleasure being connected to sin. And so one of his theories was that sugary, tasty food increased one's libido and made one quite horny and in need of sexy hand.
1:26 Speaker 01 Just so we're clear, sexy hand as in masturbation. She means masturbation.
1:33 Speaker 02 Foods that were bland, on the other hand.
1:35 Speaker 01 Unintentional pun.
1:36 Speaker 02 Could quell your need for sexual reprieve.
1:40 Speaker 01 And was this based on any evidence at all?
1:43 Speaker 02 Absolutely not. It was based on his wishful thinking. But that being said, do you know anyone who has ever felt turned on after eating a bowl of cornflakes?
1:53 Speaker 01 I mean, no.
1:54 Speaker 02 No, maybe there was some logic to it.
1:58 Speaker 01 So the idea was that Corn Flakes, because they were bland, would stop people's urges to masturbate. Now, in the interest of total accuracy, this might not have been the original exclusive purpose of Corn Flakes. There's evidence the cereal was actually created to help with indigestion, a less exciting origin story. But John Kellogg was also quite vocal about his beliefs that bland diets helped stop sexy urges, specifically masturbation. And Corn Flakes was part of that diet.
2:29 Speaker 02 Corn Flakes, you know, caught on. And I think that the success of Corn Flakes and Kellogg's brand in general stands as testament to how widely publicized and popular methods of anti-masturbatory meals and methods were at the time. It was something we were really concerned about.
2:53 Speaker 01 This is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. For as long as we have existed, we have probably masturbated.
3:00 Speaker 03 We are a primate. We are a large ape, to be specific. So a lot of the reasons that humans might masturbate are probably rooted in our evolutionary history.
3:09 Speaker 01 And for many people, masturbating is their first sexual experience.
3:13 Speaker 04 So that's why masturbation is very important. And I continue to use in my clinical work, taking a thorough history of masturbation.
3:21 Speaker 01 And despite what Kellogg and his ilk thought, masturbation hasn't always been considered deviant or disordered behavior.
3:29 Speaker 02 Was seen as a social good. It was something that you could pour your sexual energy into to stop you committing adultery.
3:36 Speaker 01 And yet, it's also true that many people still have hangups about it.
3:41 Speaker 04 As a psychosexual therapist, you get to see a lot of people thinking they have something abnormal.
3:46 Speaker 01 So today, from disordered behavior to good for you, we track our evolving attitudes towards masturbation in this episode and delve into the shame and confusion that can still exist.
4:04 Speaker 01 Before 1712, the word masturbate didn't exist, although the behaviour sure did.
4:11 Speaker 02 If you go back to different civilizations all throughout history, like ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, masturbation wasn't just considered something that was normal, but it was actually considered a social good. In places like ancient Greece, they had these conceptions that masturbation was something that we should practise because it was able to satisfy our sexual needs. And if our sexual needs are satisfied, with or without a partner, that would stop us doing things like committing adultery, which was something they were really trying to fight against at the time.
4:46 Speaker 01 This is Esme Louise James, PhD candidate, sex historian, author of Kinky History and TikTok superstar.
4:54 Speaker 05 Welcome to Kinky History. Let's discuss the history of giving heads.
4:58 Speaker 01 Her Funny and Frank videos about the history of sex have earned her nearly 2.5 million followers on TikTok and about half a million over on Instagram.
5:09 Speaker 05 And of course, we can never have a conversation about the history of sex without mentioning ancient Greece.
5:14 Speaker 02 The same thing goes in cultures from ancient Samaria, for example. And they believed that practising self-pleasure would increase your sexual potency. So the more often that you were able to masturbate, the more likely you were to be fertile and be able to have children. So there was this idea of masturbation being a very healthy part of the human experience, which we now know from scientific studies today is entirely accurate.
5:39 Speaker 01 So when and why did it start to become a taboo?
5:43 Speaker 02 So the war on masturbation, if we had to give it a set date, is in 1712. This is when we have a publication called O'Nea, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, comes out. Now, in this fantastic publication, written by a pseudo-surgeon, as we now call him.
6:05 Speaker 01 This was a guy named John Martin, and he was an Englishman.
6:08 Speaker 02 We basically have this treatise basically saying that masturbation is everything wrong with humankind. It is the thing that can make you go blind. That was a huge concern in the early modern period, that you could go blind. It's also believed to give you epilepsy, give you cancer, just anything that could possibly go wrong, masturbation is the cause of it.
6:32 Speaker 02 And when this comes out, it really causes a lot of a stir. Even though the rest of what this surgeon did in his life has been widely discredited, this is one thing that we just took away from the whole endeavour. And this publication led to the rise of other publications discussing the sinfulness of masturbation.
6:53 Speaker 01 So before this pamphlet and this guy, were there not religious ideas, like Christian ideas about the sinfulness of masturbation already? Like, did he just turbocharge it?
7:03 Speaker 02 The idea of body being connected to sin is something that we see through the last thousand years of human history. But what's really interesting is that masturbation is kind of left out of the equation. While we have these constant negotiations about what it means to have sex and have sex with other people, other genders, that's constantly in discussion, masturbation just kind of slips through the cracks. So much so that it takes until this publication in 1712 for the term masturbation to even be coined. Up until then, it was really just, as I say, such a normal part of the human experience that we didn't even think to give it a name.
7:40 Speaker 01 And so, okay, in the 1700s, this taboo emerges, at least in the West. How did things progress from there?
7:48 Speaker 02 Progressively worse and worse would be the nonofficial answer to that question.
7:55 Speaker 01 So what happens over the next couple of hundred years? Well, here's a very brief overview. You get Kellogg pushing bland anti-masturbation diets.
8:05 Speaker 02 Kellogg said that you could literally die by your own hand, which is a phrase that I love so much.
8:10 Speaker 01 You get Victorian morality. Things really started to go downhill for women in particular, though. Once doctors learned that a female orgasm wasn't strictly necessary for a woman to become pregnant.
8:22 Speaker 02 And if women's orgasm is not needed, then we need to stop her touching herself because it serves no social purpose, other than giving her pleasure.
8:32 Speaker 01 Basically, masturbation enters its deviant and disordered era.
8:37 Speaker 01 And the hangover from this time period lingers today.
8:41 Speaker 06 So I was an early masturbator. I started like at seven or eight. And my earliest memory is getting caught by my dad, but he just kind of ignored it.
8:53 Speaker 07 I went to an all-girls private school in Sydney. And the topic of masturbation was taboo, other than denouncing it as gross.
9:05 Speaker 05 I grew up in Brisbane in the 90s, in what can only be described as a puritanical household. The thought of sex being for pleasure, let alone anything being for self-pleasure, was completely foreign to me.
9:20 Speaker 07 And that was generally the vibe among the girls. It was just like gross, like, ugh, kind of thing.
9:27 Speaker 01 And of course, no one culture or religion has a monopoly on ideas about masturbation being bad or wrong.
9:35 Speaker 06 And they never explicitly talked to me about masturbation. But I learned a lot from like Sunday School and maybe through hearsay or other Muslims that if you masturbated, you'd go to hell. And I always just thought, well, I'm gonna go to hell for this, but it won't be the same hot hell as the one you go to for premarital sex.
9:58 Speaker 07 And I think back in the day, the mags we used to read, like Girlfriend and Cosmo, were more into how to deliver a good blowjob instead of how to pleasure oneself.
10:15 Speaker 01 Now, I just want to make one thing clear. We're not looking to judge any one person's beliefs about masturbation in this episode. Like, if you think it's sinful or wrong for whatever reason, that's your prerogative. What we want to explore, though, is the distress that can arise when a person's beliefs about masturbation conflict with their behaviour. And we'll get into that in a whole lot more detail in a moment. But first, a word on the benefits of masturbation. Because as ancient civilizations knew intimately, pun, and modern science now proves, there are all kinds of benefits that can come from the behaviour, for men and women. For example, it can help with stress relief and improve your mood
10:59 Speaker 01 because masturbating releases endorphins, which are the group of hormones that make us feel pleasure and wellbeing. There's also evidence that it might help lower the risk of prostate cancer, help ease menstrual cramps, help with sleep. And a number of studies have found a link between masturbation and positive body image, especially in women. Now, I've taken most of these facts from the Queensland Department of Health website. They have a page titled "Give Yourself a Hand: The Health Benefits of Masturbation", which makes me wonder if perhaps we're back to seeing the act as a potential social good, in certain corners anyways.
11:41 Speaker 04 Right. Can I start by saying today, the day we are recording, 4th of September is World Sexual Health Day?
11:47 Speaker 01 Oh, is it?
11:48 Speaker 04 Yeah.
11:48 Speaker 01 I didn't know that.
11:49 Speaker 04 And every year, we have a different theme, and this year, the theme is positive relationship. Now, when you hear the word "relationship", we jump into thinking two or more people. But I would like to bring it back. It's a relationship that you have with yourself.
12:06 Speaker 01 Right.
12:06 Speaker 04 The relationship between mind and body.
12:09 Speaker 01 This is Dr. Vijay Ramanathan, sex therapist and senior lecturer in sexual health, sexology at the University of Sydney.
12:17 Speaker 04 So you can loop back the relationship within an individual. And I think masturbation sits right in there. Because when you masturbate, most people touch their genitalia. Not everyone.
12:32 Speaker 01 It's kind of part of it, right? Oh, really?
12:33 Speaker 04 Part of it. But the main sex organ is not the one that is down under. It's the brain.
12:40 Speaker 01 Okay. I was like, what are you talking about? Where is this organ?
12:43 Speaker 04 Well, the largest organ in the body is skin. And the main organ is brain. If you connect these two, the skin could become a very important sex organ. And touch is the strongest sense in the body. So when you combine all of this, masturbation becomes a very powerful act and experience. And it connects the mind, body, and the spirit. If those who believe in spirit, masturbation, when you elicit pleasure, when you get aroused, when you feel it, when you sense it. It's actually a great mind-body connection.
13:19 Speaker 01 I've never heard masturbation described this way as such a whole-body spiritual kind of thing. I love it, though. That's a great. Dr. Vijay says to drive the most benefit out of masturbation, it can help to engage in mindful masturbation.
13:32 Speaker 04 It's not a routine pleasure. Just open up a window, watch a porn, just sit in the same position, do exactly the same thing without paying attention to anything. Whereas sex therapists, we use what is called mindful masturbation, where you actually pay respect. If you like it so much, give some due importance to it.
13:54 Speaker 01 Okay.
13:54 Speaker 04 Touch the whole body, touch different parts of the body. Enjoy it, appreciate the pleasure, appreciate the thoughts and feelings that comes to your mind. And that's why it's so relaxing. So one major benefit, it's relaxing.
14:15 Speaker 01 And so, right, there are clearly benefits and it can be relaxing and all of that. But obviously masturbation can be a source of a lot of mental distress for certain people, especially if you are inclined to feel shame around it or think that it's wrong. Can you talk about the distress that masturbation can cause?
14:32 Speaker 04 Why is that we are somehow making the behavior is the problem here? When people say, I'm distressed about masturbation, what are they distressed about? That's a question we need to ask. Now, this is how I would explain to my clients. There are three different scenarios, three possible scenarios.
14:50 Speaker 01 These scenarios have to do with how a person's thoughts, feelings and behavior interact. Here's scenario one.
14:58 Speaker 04 A person who thinks masturbation is absolutely great, fantastic, healthy, no issues whatsoever. Feelings, they feel good while they masturbate. They feel good after they finish masturbating. Behavior, they continue to masturbate at whatever regular interval they prefer to and they can do. In scenario one, there is no problem whatsoever.
15:22 Speaker 01 Then in scenario two?
15:24 Speaker 04 The person thinks masturbation is absolutely wrong. Could be health reasons, could be religious reasons. Health reasons, we don't have to go convince them. If they think it's not healthy, so be it. We respect their position on it. Feelings, they know if they masturbate, they'll feel very bad about it.
15:45 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
15:46 Speaker 04 Against their values. They don't masturbate. Scenario two is absolutely fine.
15:51 Speaker 01 Right. So you don't, you don't feel the need to counter their ideas around health and, and the rest?
15:57 Speaker 04 If they want to seek clarification, we do. But sex therapists, we don't necessarily shove it on their face. You must masturbate. We can't make it as a condition. And that's a general counselling in any mental health field. We don't become too prescriptive. If for that particular person, if it's against their values, so be it.
16:18 Speaker 01 Okay.
16:19 Speaker 04 Now, these two scenarios, have you seen any problems so far?
16:24 Speaker 01 Uh, no, the person who's happy is happy doing it. The person who's not happy doing it doesn't do it.
16:29 Speaker 04 Now, listen to the third scenario.
16:31 Speaker 01 Right.
16:32 Speaker 04 The person thinks masturbation is somewhat okay, but still holds on to some deep beliefs and values that it could be wrong, it could end up in some problem. The feeling is while they masturbate, they feel nice.
16:47 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
16:47 Speaker 04 But constantly thinking whether there's something could be happen. But that intense sexual arousal and stimulation masks that, so they feel nice.
16:56 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
16:57 Speaker 04 But the moment they ejaculate or finish the act of masturbation, they feel terrible.
17:03 Speaker 01 Hmm.
17:03 Speaker 04 Oh my God, I've done it again. I couldn't control myself. But that feeling hasn't stopped them from masturbating the day after.
17:14 Speaker 01 Right, they can't.
17:15 Speaker 04 They go back.
17:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:17 Speaker 04 Because the stimulation, the urge comes up again. So this scenario is the complicated.
17:25 Speaker 01 Right.
17:25 Speaker 04 So there is a strong conflict between the thoughts and feelings. So they are going to feel stressed about it.
17:33 Speaker 01 And are most of the clients who come to you for help, by the time they see you, are they in that scenario?
17:38 Speaker 04 I would say seventy to eighty percentage are.
17:41 Speaker 01 Okay, wow.
17:41 Speaker 04 And I don't want to paint this as something very cultural. I do get a lot of men of all cultures in the scenario three.
17:52 Speaker 01 Okay, so with clients, the ones who are conflicted but still doing it, what do you advise they do or how do you work through that? Well, is it about talking about mindful masturbation or yeah?
18:02 Speaker 04 First of all, we need to find out whether they are willing to align.
18:06 Speaker 01 Okay.
18:07 Speaker 04 Because we use person-centered approach. I can identify, look, this is what causing it. It's not the behavior, it's how you think and how you feel. Would you like to work on that? Oh, yeah. So then we can say which one is easier to change. Now, sometimes we have to talk about routine pleasure versus rewarding pleasure. Sometimes it's not the act of masturbation or thoughts or feelings. None of this is problematic, but the timing at which they do is problematic. They have a, they have a whole lot of homework or work or tasks to do. But the urge is so powerful, they want to masturbate.
18:45 Speaker 01 Right.
18:45 Speaker 04 Once they masturbate, they feel tired, which is a natural thing, which is a good thing. But that tiredness, they want to go relax, watch a movie. Now, what that means, their homework or task is getting pushed on. Now, they are getting stressed about that, but they are blaming it on masturbation. Masturbation never asked you to do at that particular time. You chose to do that. However, we don't have to change anything except for one thing. How about you finish your tasks for the day? And once you, because you have done all your homework or task, you masturbate and then you go relax. So it's changing that mentality about masturbation.
19:30 Speaker 01 This is All in the Mind on ABC Radio National. I'm Sana Qadar. Now, I just want to expand your thinking about masturbation for a moment because this is a behavior that has been part of the sexual repertoire of animals, human and non-human, for millions of years.
19:49 Speaker 06 So many animals and mammals in particular have spontaneous erections and masturbatory behaviours of all different sorts, like cats, dogs, rhinoceros, like 80 species of primate.
20:04 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
20:04 Speaker 06 It seems like everybody likes to pleasure this.
20:08 Speaker 01 I mean, get it, girl.
20:09 Speaker 06 Yeah, like, I mean, if you can think of the animal, it probably does it.
20:14 Speaker 01 If you're an avid listener of ABC Science podcasts, you'll know who this is. It's Dr Anne Jones, professional nature nerd and host of What the Duck, a show that explores the mysteries of nature. And they're doing a whole series on sexual behaviour in the animal kingdom called Sex is Weird.
20:32 Speaker 06 In evolutionary time sense, we're not that far separate from any of these creatures, really.
20:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:38 Speaker 06 The Earth is like 4.5 billion years old and modern humans are only 600 million years, right? So like, it's a tiny little, we're a blip on the radar of the sexual history of Earth.
20:50 Speaker 01 Yeah. And do all animals do this? Or are there some that we know just don't?
20:56 Speaker 06 I just tend to think that it's probably things that we haven't observed.
20:59 Speaker 01 Okay. And so, and why do they do it? Is it like same reasons as humans?
21:03 Speaker 06 Yeah, well, yeah, in some ways, in the literature, what seems to be is there's this idea that they might be, say bulls or stallions, might be avoiding aggression and it'll help them relax. So this is something you hear about in humans. I think it helps people relax so that they can go to sleep perhaps, you know?
21:21 Speaker 01 Right, yeah.
21:22 Speaker 06 And in fact, with those bulls, in one of the studies, they found that they spent more time each day masturbating than self grooming.
21:30 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
21:31 Speaker 06 But the masturbation happened just before the workers got to the barn and just after the workers left the barn. They did it in times-
21:39 Speaker 01 In private.
21:40 Speaker 06 In private.
21:40 Speaker 01 Wow.
21:41 Speaker 06 When they were nice and relaxed. There was no stresses in their environment. So that sort of puts paid to some of that thing of you do it when you're feeling really aggressive, because actually they were doing it when they were perhaps feeling really relaxed.
21:53 Speaker 01 Okay, and what do we know about female animals?
21:56 Speaker 06 Well, in female primates, masturbation happens in 42% of all of-
22:02 Speaker 02 The genre, so all of the little families of the tree. So like, has been observed. And Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist, noted that as she was observing, the females were rubbing themselves and laughing softly. So they enjoy it.
22:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:20 Speaker 02 Like, you know, that's really got to be the main hypothesis. But like humans, there's really complex politics and culture around mate selection and sex. So it would not surprise me if we didn't uncover more complications about this in the future.
22:41 Speaker 01 Let's stick with primates for another minute since they are our ancestors. And a study published last year by researchers in the UK found masturbation was a behaviour that could be traced back 40 million years. The authors found this by trawling through hundreds of studies and notes about masturbating primates from primatologists and zookeepers, and then mapping that info onto the primate evolutionary tree.
23:07 Speaker 03 So a lot of the reasons that humans might masturbate are probably rooted in our evolutionary history.
23:13 Speaker 01 This is evolutionary biologist Matilda Brindle, who was the lead author on that study. And she says why the behaviour evolved isn't totally clear, but there are a few hypotheses. One being that masturbation could boost the chances for a male to impregnate a female, especially lower ranking males, who might have a very small window in which to ejaculate before a higher ranking male comes along.
23:37 Speaker 03 And a really good strategy for these males basically is to keep themselves aroused. So that if they do get a chance to mate, then they're able to ejaculate much faster and have a lower chance of getting beaten up and a higher chance of actually finishing with the female.
23:51 Speaker 01 In females, one theory is that masturbating might make the vagina more hospitable to sperm.
23:56 Speaker 03 So lots of animals, for example, lots of species of primate, have what's called a multi-male, multi-female mating system, where basically they're all mating with each other in a group. And so in this instance, if a female is already mating with lots of males, one idea is that Masturbation might actually increase arousal. And in females, they can actually use masturbation to basically be choosy about which male they're fertilized by if they're mating with multiple males. So in humans at least, during the course of arousal, the vaginal pH becomes a lot more neutral. Normally, the vagina is mildly acidic, basically to keep out any nasty pathogens.
24:35 Speaker 03 But the flip side of this is that if it's keeping out pathogens, then it's probably not great for sperm either. So this is why when females become aroused, the vagina becomes basically a little bit more hospitable to sperm.
24:50 Speaker 01 So these might be some of the evolutionary underpinnings for why we masturbate. But regardless of what science might tell us, deeply held beliefs can be hard to shake. And the taboo around masturbation isn't just a vestige of the past.
25:06 Speaker 02 I think even the most sex positive people in our society have still had to go through a big process of unlearning this sense of guilt and shame that has been associated now for, as I say, two centuries.
25:20 Speaker 04 And and there are many ideas I do come across every now and then where people have put excessive importance and value to semen. People don't understand not everything that they spill is sperm, right? It's only five percent of sperm. Everything else is just a liquid. But historically, culturally, there's a lot of emphasis put on the ejaculate. So it's like every time you ejaculate, you're killing hundred people, just as an example.
25:48 Speaker 01 Right.
25:49 Speaker 04 So don't do it. It's a sin.
25:50 Speaker 01 So misguided ideas around.
25:52 Speaker 04 Misguided ideas. Going back to my tagline, thoughts are not facts. We need to question. Yeah, it's a thought, but is it a fact?
26:01 Speaker 03 I think it's it's an interesting one. For me, one of the really, really important messages that's come from this research is that masturbation is common across the animal kingdom. It occurs in both females and males, happens in the wild as well as in captivity. And I think this is a very strong counter to the argument put forward by some people that masturbation. Is abnormal or even unnatural. Clearly, this couldn't be further from the truth. I imagine some people will put forward the argument that, well, animals do it, and we should be above animals, and therefore we shouldn't do it. But frankly, we are an animal. You know, I'm not encouraging people to be discussing it over breakfast, but I think the shame that a lot of people hold,
26:46 Speaker 03 hopefully, this research can help dismiss some of that.
26:51 Speaker 02 But the main takeaway is that it has always been a part of the human experience and will continue to be part of the human experience. And therefore, it's really important for us to have a good understanding about how we can engage with it in a healthy and ethical way.
27:12 Speaker 01 That is All in the Mind for this week. Thanks to Esme Louise James, PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, sex historian and TikTok content creator. Thanks also to sex therapist and senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, Dr Vijay Ramanathan, and to evolutionary biologist Matilda Brindle from Oxford University in the UK. And I can't forget Dr Anne Jones, host of the ABC podcast What the Duck. Her series on sex in the animal kingdom is called Sex is Weird. So to listen to that, just search for What the Duck on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts, and you can hear that series.
27:55 Speaker 01 All in the Mind is produced by Rose Kerr and senior producer James Bullen. It's also produced and presented by me, Sana Qadar. And our sound engineer this week was Beth Stewart. And hey, if you're a fan of All in the Mind, we're always on the hunt for new stories on the show. So if you've had something remarkable or unusual or amazing happen in your life that's linked to the brain or human behaviour or psychology, we want to hear about it. Email us on [email protected] . We can't guarantee we'll include the story, but plenty of stories have made it into our show that have come through our inbox. All right, thank you for listening this week. I will catch you next time.
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